Double Down

Humans enjoy being cruel. Not just the ones who create the framework, gather the implements and set to torturing souls, for the… fun of it? There’s a whole field of villagers who show up, buy a corn dog and wait for the show. Those with atavistic eyes, who notice when the witch really begins to burn. As we gear up for our next epoch of sacking, tearing down, pillaging and so forth, I find myself paying more attention than usual to people around me.

I see a lady walking her dog and wonder if having a pet she cares about means she might not buy a ticket to my disembowelment. Or at the very least, might wince as they carve me up, because she saw a play I wrote once and as she recalls, I was a funny bitch. We seem hardwired for this. Hate has been with us since the first two leggeds bowed to one specific two legged. His certainty was probably a heady thing. Once he’d made a few decisions, he started thinking he was pretty good at being the leader. Until a pterodactyl popped his head like a grape. But then maybe he had a son who looked a little like him…

Either way, it’s our story. Power is there to be grabbed, while most of us are trying to feed our kids. It happens everywhere, all the time. The things they take can’t be returned. Your confidence. Your autonomy. Your sense of who you are. You protect where you can, and grow around the incursions. The rape, the fear and the degradation may not define you, but they inform you. They shape you and what you learn to expect from this world. If I could, I would become a house cat. Left alone, and subject to adoration. Well, I’d be a cat in my house. Which cancels it out. Like my small musty Maple cat, I’d smell like butthole and bite as often as I purred. I want to be a crow, flying with my crew and trash talking everyone beneath me. Which is everyone.

Being human is excruciating. There’s an expectation of civility and a veneer of ignoring the base and the indelicate. As a technique, it’s worked quite well. Aspirational Control is a great tool. As long as you could be better than someone else, there’s hope for you! It covers for those times when the Worthy get you between their teeth and shake you so hard you lose sight of your soul. Smile, nod and then go to your cave and process. If you can.

I am tired of veneers. Of nips and tucks and what the fucks. I’m sick of smiling and nodding and pretending later that it was defiance. When they go low, where do you go? What line are you holding in the dark that makes it possible for you to connect with your ancestors? Your line stretches back as far as people go. How did they strive, survive and thrive? When They Go Low, what do you do? When they go low, I will wait until we have tipped over into chaos, and then I’ll join all the other soft creatures fighting for their lives, disemboweling as many as I can until they end me. I will double down on what I’ve been pushed into. And then I’ll fly away.

My hideaway

I’m torn. I have told myself that I write for publication, to be seen. To get paid. And I’ve had this website for years now, for the sole purpose of ‘doing something with it’. I am increasingly getting paid for what I do, and the more notice I get the more I find myself drawn to this site as my repository for stories. Something to leave my family when my days are done. I no longer feel the driving pull to communicate with faceless readers, or weigh in on anything.

Before summer, I erased all my social media. I was starving on a daily diet of it, the babble of it all. The thing that had drawn me to the internet, the quiet insertion of a scalpel, and a place to tuck my thoughts, began to arouse a horror in me. I felt an infection spreading through me. It became unmanageable. I walked through my day thinking of ways I could die. Not depression, and not a wish to die. Just a notion that I could, if the pressure of knowing I was witnessing a genocide, that our ecology is fucked, and we have chosen to let it all happen got to be too much. So I saw myself cascading over the edge of my favorite viewing spot up the alley from my house. Not a wish to die, just a mute understanding that the poison was taking over.

So I purged myself. I didn’t replace one crappy ap with another one. All is silence in the cyber world. I am more peaceful. Those images are with me less. And the reality of where we are is… unmanageable. Not panicking, because I knew the monsters were winning. As long as we’re plugged in, messages bombard us with ‘facts’. Mirrors are placed away from the very real tragedies unfolding daily, and replaced with people prognosticating useless words while the truth unspools in our water, and in the bodies in the rubble in Palestine.

Words are being outlawed in the first foray into total control of our resources. It isn’t personal. They just want all of what’s left, and they have to handle this transition daintily. I have no words that haven’t already been spoken by people far smarter, deeper and more connected to universal truth and suffering than I ever will be. I have nothing but what my eyes are filtering, and what my experiences collate daily, with ICE crawling all over my town and county, with people saying poison into the air about how it’s all part of a better plan. None of this was predestined. It was a choice. And then another one. And civilizations were built on it. And schools were created around it.

And now our children are being shot and bleeding out in these places they are learning the hard truth, which is we are cogs, building empire for the few, and as the lies they tell us disappear, our children’s blood is the sacrifice. Along with our pensions. Our social security. Think of those two words, and then laugh til you cry mother fucker. The party? Is over. As the natural world preps to purge us, old white men gather to carve up what’s left. Those of us who survive to serve them will wish we hadn’t.

And I can know these things and still be strangely at peace. So much suffering has gone into the making of this ‘union’. Who am I to give up when I can finally see the field we’ve been battling on so clearly? What makes me different than the indigenous, or those who were enslaved? My birthright is this country, and I’ve learned my lessons. I know I am not separate for the suffering of all the silenced voices. They have been waiting for me. We don’t outrun evil. There are deeper laws, and we all have to abide by them, even the ones creating it. If you don’t stand up now, you’ll kneel before them later. Until the earth decides to evict every last one of us and get on with regenerating. Like we were never here.

I like the idea of this clean place I’ve created. A little voice in the ether. I was here, and even though it didn’t matter at all, I loved. I lived. And I knew the truth. That’s enough.

What if....

What if you lived long enough to run through some of the ways you’d been fooled by a world that wanted you worried. About your family, community, livelihood, status, soul and social media presence? What if you added up the numbers and realized that over half your life had been spent looking for connection and clues on how to live, only to find you fooled yourself into thinking about things that made you dumber and less human? And what if one day you started listening to the hum in your brain and shut down every system that didn’t serve the purpose of making you more present, more humble, and you started listening to the noise inside you and tried to find the music that would lead you to the end of your path? What would you do? What steps would you take to become more of yourself? I am answering these questions for myself. I thought I wanted to be Somebody. I don’t. I want to understand, and upward mobility hasn’t helped. I’ve stopped everything that doesn’t offer me contact with that understanding. All the noise, all the opinion, all the greed, and the grasping, wet, wanting of it all. I have been sick inside for most of my life. This is my small careful path to something better.